At TravelChannel.com, we try to share different travel experiences with our audience, as we did with our recent feature about Travel Noire and its Afro-centric perspective. We wanted to share the LGBT travel experience, too, so we decided to chat with Don Tuthill, the visionary behind Passport, a print and online resource that has become the insider’s guide to LGBT travel, thanks in part to a team of experienced, well-traveled writers. Find out more about the Passport brand and why Don is our type of traveler this week.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, Travel Channel is heating things up this winter with new content to attract gay and lesbian travelers. You may not know it, but the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) tourism industry is big business, raking in $65 billion a year, according to Community Marketing Inc.’s annual LGBT Tourism Study.

The study reveals that the LGBT community has increased their travel in the last year, despite the economic downturn, with gay men taking an average of 3 trips last year. And gay travelers spare no expense to enjoy traveling abroad to other countries. Eighty-five percent of gay males and 77% of lesbians own a passport, compared with a 30% rate of all Americans. Last year, 54% of gay men used their passport. READ MORE